All those who jump out of the inner volume have achieved ecological niche differentiation, and what can be outstanding must be to break the shackles of the ecological niche locking effect.
Analytical framework
In the case of limited resources, the occurrence of ecological niche overlap will aggravate resource scarcity, and the only solution is ecological niche differentiation.
The advantage of differentiation is that it can eat the dividends of the times and build a mental moat in the competition, at the same time, we must also be vigilant against the threats behind the opportunities - the lock-in effect and the head blow.
The only way to survive is to be the head.
What is an inner volume
In the competition with limited resources, we gradually rolled inwards, we were forced to roll inwards, and we tried so hard, but we still got nothing.
The inner volume is the inflation of effort, the most intuitive experience is: high pay, low return, it puts us into an unnecessary competition, the result is that the majority loses, the minority earns.
When grabbing tickets, one person used the ticket snatching software, and others had to use this software to grab the ticket, but the total number of tickets is fixed, so many people can't grab the ticket, but the developer of the ticket-snatching software earns.
Regarding the inner volume, the most vivid metaphor is: in the audience of the movie theater, everyone is quietly watching the movie, and suddenly the people in the first row stand up first, the second row blocked by him has to stand up and look, and then the third row, the fourth row, the fifth row... They also stood up one after another.
Why is it rolled inside
Inner volumes occur because of the overlap of niches, i.e., competition follows the laws of ecological niches in nature, also known as the GEUS principle.
This law is derived from the experiments of the Russian Lyus.
When he put the double-nucleated grasshopper and the large grasshopper in the same medium, their numbers both showed an S-shaped curve, but when they were all placed in the same medium and controlled a certain amount of food, after 16 days, the double-nucleated grasshopper lived well, but the large grasshopper disappeared.
After observation, it was found that the double-core grasshopper grew faster when competing with the large grasshopper for the same food, and the large grasshopper was driven out of the medium.
This shows that their ecological niches overlap, that is, in the same environment, under the competition of fixed resources and space, the strong one is king in the end, and when it is put into our modern society, it is the one who is involved in the extreme.
Then, Geus did the opposite experiment, putting the large grasshopper and the bag-shaped grasshopper in the same environment for culture, and the result was that both survived and reached a stable equilibrium level.
Although these two kinds of insects compete for the same food, the bag-shaped grasshopper occupies the part of the food that is not needed by the large grasshopper, which avoids the overlap of ecological niches, like a plate of scrambled eggs with tomatoes, you only eat tomatoes, I only eat eggs, you can coexist peacefully.
In nature, whoever exists must have an ecological niche.
Species with the same habits of life do not compete for the same living space in the same place.
If there must be spatial division in an area at the same time, even if the weak and the strong are in the same living space, the weak can still survive easily, so the eagle strikes the long sky, the fish soars to the bottom, and no two species have exactly the same ecological niche.
Except for the space. The same is true in terms of food dependence, there are those who eat meat, there are grass, eating meat and grass will stagger the time, lions show their might during the day, tigers run rampant in the evening, and wolves forage late at night.
The phenomenon of ecological niches is a general principle of universality to all living phenomena, and it applies equally to human beings, because all the attributes of living things are possessed by human beings.
Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, once said: Never try to use tactical diligence to cover up strategic laziness.
The person who devotes the most time to "involution" cannot accomplish much greater.
How to deal with inner volumes
In fact, inner volumes are not an exclusive experience of our generation, and throughout history's inner volumes, we can be inspired to avoid overlapping niches.
In the feudal era, Our country was a self-sufficient agrarian economy, and the increase in population inevitably led to internal rolls.
Because land resources are limited and the output of grain is limited, increasing the labor force will bring about social problems such as insufficient food and vicious competition, followed by the replacement of dynasties.
In the West, every industrial revolution is also because under the serious internal roll, it has found a breakthrough in science and technology and realized the transformation of the market economy.
In 1785, Watt invented the improved steam engine; in 1866, Siemens invented the generator; and in 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite.
So, in English, the antonym for involution is not outer volume, but evolution.
We found that to solve the problem of internal volume, the key lies in having an outward force to break through the original system, that is, we are not competing in the same ecological niche, but to jump out of the original circle, find new ecological niches, and achieve dislocation competition.
The advantages of niche differentiation
The method of staggering competition is ecological niche differentiation, but why does it work? We analyze it from the perspective of environmental advantages and competitive advantages.
Times Dividend
The era dividend refers more to the policy and technology to bring, the use of the outlet to achieve ecological niche differentiation, not only can develop themselves, but also to reduce the dimensionality of the nearby ecological niche.
The changes of the business era are very prominent in this regard.
In the era of business 1.0, it is the dividends brought by reform and opening up, in the context of relative shortage of products, cheap labor, and extensive demand, soon formed a seller's market in short supply, at this time, as long as the information is well-informed, you can use the difference to make money.
In the era of business 2.0, technology has brought the Internet, and after 30 years of development of Chinese physical stores, homogenization has become more and more serious, that is, after the ecological niche overlaps, an internal volume has occurred, and those who know how to compete in dislocation have naturally harvested wealth.
How to do it, when the ecological niche of the physical store is overcrowded, a group of people use the dividends brought by the Internet, from offline dislocation to online, and carry out a dimensionality reduction blow to the physical store, the people who understand the times the most, the times never treat them badly.
When more and more people poured into the new ecological niche track, e-commerce brought everyone back to the price war and homogenization of the inner coil circle.
The e-commerce war has brought overcapacity, that is, oversupply, you do not sell someone to sell, you do not do someone to do, this ecological niche is not good, and continue to differentiate, how to do it? Those astute businessmen are aware of a huge change: the level of mass consumption has upgraded – business 3.0 is coming.
What does this mean? It means that from meeting basic needs to wanting their own products, they once again find a new ecological niche: product value-added, either to the extreme, to serve specific groups of people, or to take the road of customization.
Ma Yun once said: "If there is any dividend in China that has not been tapped, trust and mutual trust are the greatest untapped wealth." He spoke of China's biggest dividend: social credit relations.
The development of social media has allowed everyone to enter the business 4.0 era of "weak information, strong relationship", everyone is an independent IP, we get more information from sharing, rather than informing, with the help of credit dividends to seize this ecological niche, so you see not the official brand of the call, but the rise of big V, self-media, and various niche brands.
Follow the east wind of the policy, use the dividends of technology, come to your ecological niche, and you can borrow the ladder to ascend to the sky.
Mental advantage
A huge benefit of niche differentiation is that it can avoid frontal hard steel, which is especially common in brand positioning.
Here we must mention a concept called the mental ladder, and on each ladder, there is a brand.
The highest tier is the most well-known brand, which is usually preferred, and the second tier is the second brand, usually the second choice of potential customers.
If this ladder is Coke, then the first two cascade brands are Coca-Cola and Pepsi. If this ladder is herbal tea, then the brands of the first two ladders are Wang Laoji and Jiaduobao.
Theoretically, such a ladder has 7 blocks, but in fact, it may only have about 3 blocks.
If your brand does not squeeze into the first two ladders, the usual fate is to disappear, even if you come later, you will be labeled as "so-and-so successor", which is essentially a potential customer lazy to remember, unwilling to start a new memory cost for a new brand.
So is there no way out? Only two opportunities in a category?
In fact, the opportunity lies in creating another ladder. If you can't take the second place in the existing mental ladder, then build another ladder.
Wang Laoji is the best example, she did not line up under the coke ladder, but created the herbal tea mental ladder and occupied the first place in this ladder.
In the 10 years after Wang Laoji launched the red can herbal tea, there has been no new product, and the protagonist of the publicity has always been the red can herbal tea, simple, direct, boring, but effectively entered the mind.
Interestingly, as Wang Laoji created a new herbal tea ladder, there was also the phenomenon of cola ladder, and behind Wang Laoji and Jiaduobao, there were soy sauce brands like Shaolin Coke and Tianfu Cola: Bawang Herbal Tea, Deng Lao Herbal Tea, Xu Qixiu Herbal Tea and so on.
If you have successfully created a new mental ladder through ecological niche differentiation, then you will create a new category and become the representative of the category and the first choice of consumers.
For competitors who later entered the track, it played a mental moat effect.
Threats of niche differentiation
Stagger the competition, and do you do it once and for all? No, the changes of the times and the entry of competitors are a blow to the head.
Lock-up effect
The book Scarcity reveals why the poor remain poor: in order to cope with a poor life, the poor form a corresponding cognitive state, which makes it impossible for the poor to get rid of the existing ecological niche.
The poor yearn for riches, and the rich tell him that they can live the lives of the rich by buying luxury goods, so the poor over-consume, even borrow, and become heavily indebted have further solidified his ecological niche.
Poor people like to be satisfied in time, because there is not much joy in the poor life, so they will enjoy it immediately when they earn money, and this mentality can ensure that they are full of hope and thus naturally endure poverty.
If the book "Scarcity" is placed in business operations, its name is "The Innovator's Dilemma".
Sony mastered digital music player technology earlier than Apple, but sony records have a model: if you like the song, you have to buy the record.
The MP3 model is: if you like the song, you can buy a song, you don't have to buy the whole record.
Sony is stuck in a poor mentality with new technologies: they are not willing to endure the loss of the present for future opportunities, and they are more content with the immediate satisfaction of the record model.
Sony Records' perception is completely consistent with her ecological niche, but this cognition also locks her in the existing ecological niche.
Like Nokia, Kodak and other brands, when you become the head of a certain ecological niche, you will fall into this poor mentality, and then in the face of institutional and technological impact, you will become the ghost of the changing situation of the times.
Head blows
When a new niche is full of opportunities, even if you are the first in this field, you cannot resist the invasion of head capital.
In 2020, the Internet giant opened the war of burning money and selling vegetables to seize the community group purchase outlet, the essence of capital is to pursue profits, behind the giant's entry, is a new round of traffic entrance battle.
In fact, community group buying and selling vegetables is not a new concept, as early as 2016, community group buying and selling vegetables has developed rapidly relying on WeChat, which is a sudden new crown pneumonia epidemic, bringing new opportunities to the community group buying industry.
If you have done the first community group purchase before, is it useful? The entry of Internet giants has directly made the battle for the community group buying and selling vegetable market into a white-hot one.
Alibaba relies on the offline "Hema Fresh" retail supermarket and the "Hema" APP to provide door-to-door delivery services for community residents; Didi took the lead in launching the cross-border community group buying APP "Orange Heart Preferred" in June this year and promoted it to various cities across the country; Meituan Dianping followed closely after announcing the opening of the "Meituan Preferred" business in July; Pinduoduo also launched the "Duoduo Buy Vegetables" platform on the basis of its original "Pinduoduo" sales model...
Is this not a solution? Of course not.
Being able to trigger such a huge butterfly effect must be the inevitable result of some background, in this case, the larger enterprises have to turn their backs on the mountains and take sides.
If you're an ordinary person, especially an entrepreneur, the strategy is still to try to be the head of the circle.
How to become a head
There are three steps to becoming a head: vertical deep ploughing, docking the market, and keeping pace with the times.
Vertical deep ploughing
In the current Internet era, the advantages of vertical segmentation have been very obvious, as far as the knowledge service platform is concerned, the mixed wind and water are Himalayas, Fan Deng, get and so on.
Self-media is like the six gods Lei Lei read Jin Yong, focusing on a subdivided unpopular field, finding the same group of people with the same interests as you, and making a self-media number that also sits on millions of fans.
The characteristics of vertical subdivision are single-mindedness, not pursuing large and complete, only doing things that they are familiar with in the field, and being experts and authorities in their respective industries.
As an individual, you must have your own skills, which can be what you like or what you are good at, in short, something you can focus on and continue to do.
How do you find what you're good at?
First of all, do the exclusion method and exclude everything you don't like.
Second, discover what you're doing that is easy to succeed in and that you enter the flow experience with a high frequency.
Then, go to the actual operation and use the practical feedback to determine whether you are good at it.
Finally, try more, some things are not liked at the beginning, but liked by doing.
Insist on deliberate practice and take this skill to the extreme.
For the talent test, I think it's a psychological anchor that depends on your trust in the outcome, it says you're good at doing artistic work, and the more you believe, the better you're likely to be good at it.
Docking the market
Then, through the research of various channels, to find a market that can match your skills.
After finding the market, whether the market has potential or not, considering the degree of rigidity of demand and the coverage of the demand audience.
The degree of rigidity, which must be used, is not free, can not be used, is a soft demand.
The coverage of the demand audience, if it is to be used by everyone, is the need of the public, and if it is to be used by a very small number of people, it is the demand of the minority.
After determining the market, you have two choices, one and the head hard steel, that is, the competition of overlapping ecological niches, and the other and the head complement, that is, ecological niche differentiation and peaceful symbiosis.
Times
The only solution to the ecological niche lock is to keep pace with the times and follow the trend of the times.
The next thing we want to talk about is the dividends and opportunities that the policy brings to certain ecological niches.
Some time ago, the "14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China and the Outline of Long-term Goals for 2035" was released, and many people are studying it. Because it will affect our lives and work for the next 5 years.
The "Outline" has determined a lot of details for us in quantitative form, and we focus on understanding what the core idea of this game of chess in China is.
This "14th Five-Year Plan" main indicator map, 20 indicators, is divided into five categories: economic development, innovation-driven, people's livelihood and well-being, green ecology and safety guarantees.
Among the 20 indicators, the top five with the largest changes in value in the next 5 years are 12th, 5th, 6th, 15th and 14th.
These are closely related to population, technology, and green, and they constitute the three underlying variables that drive change in China.
The three variables, which lead to one old and one small, urban agglomeration, new energy, digital China and scientific and technological innovation, these five directions will be tilted by the dividend of the policy.
So how to choose the ecological niche, you, have a direction?
The full text of the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China and the Outline of Long-term Goals for 2035: